The lesson is obvious: arresting young suspects and warehousing them at an out-of-the-way facility, regardless of how cushy, is not the same as arresting crime. Already, we have touched on the plan as it related to Broughton, a plan that made an already bad police situation worse. The plan failed its Labour conceivers. It continues to fail the present administration.
Police resources were at the center of several public outbursts involving the Kenny Anthony government and the police. Remember the number of times Central Police Station made headlines after long-suffering officers were forced into the street by exploding mephitic toilets, disease-carrying vermin and other unspeakable unnatural disasters? This was the then prime minister’s reaction to expressed public concern, delivered during one of his Conversations with the Nation: “The tendency in our society is to reject personal responsibility for our actions and misfortunes and to find reason to blame someone else.”
As if to prove his self-serving assertion, Kenny Anthony said: “The biggest recipient of national blame is always the government, and in this regard the principal culprit is your humble servant, the prime minister. You should not wish to be prime minister if you do not understand that martyrdom awaits you.”
Stephenson King, take note!
As for the complaining constabulary, Anthony said: “The police blame the government for denying them proper equipment and for not providing vehicles and drivers. Police prosecutors lose court cases, then blame the government for their incompetence. They blame the government for not hanging convicted murderers, regardless that their appeals may be before the courts.”
Of course, the police also have their own gripes, among them that the attorney general’s office in the time of the SLP administration made it almost impossible to prosecute criminals successfully. They cite the revised Criminal Code that remains “defective for the most part” and should, they say, either be scrapped or amended. The police also point to the Traffic Act that makes it impossible to successfully prosecute drivers for speeding, since it does not state the legal speed limit and drunk drivers. And then there are the problems associated with the Evidence Act that the police say make the job of bringing murderous criminals to justice all the more difficult.
Clearly, the laudable construction of new police stations in Marchand, Dennery and Vieux Fort, while they provided comfort for some police officers, had little impact on crime. Ironically, the named three areas are, by some accounts, at the center of the local drug trade.
As I say, the crime-fighting plan that failed the SLP is failing the current government. Evidently, the original plan did not take into account the age-old recurring problems at the nation’s courts, the registry and other related government departments. And of course, the plan never went past punishment. Affordable housing for the poor remains the problem it was ten years ago. Children roam the streets when they should be in school, thanks to absentee parents who may or may not be at work during school hours.
Reproduced from http://stluciastar.com/content/archives/13669
No comments:
Post a Comment